$5.5 million to at long last rebuild joe dimaggio playground and create for this space all of the incredible potential that it has. my very, very first day on the job, my very first day as s as rec and park director i met with luis and my staff and said there are only six words that you need to know. that is it. do you remember them in a? there are only six words that you need to know and that is, "the library belongs on the triangle." [ laughter ] and here we are on the triangle. [ applause ] so my last big thank you and before i give my last thank i want to recognize recreation and park and plan commissioner

cindy wu is also here. thank you, cindy. [ applause ] my last big thank you is to you. is to the friends of joe dimaggio playground and the neighbors here who have fought and fought and fought. the giants actually opened up at at&t park in 2000 and it took 12 years or it took 10 years for our first world championship, right? it's taken ten years to get to this spot right now. thank you friends of joe dimaggio playground and thunk lizzy and thank you all for your persistence and thank you for putting the community interest above your self interests because quite frankly, the kids are in college now since the project started this. is an amazing inspired project and thank you to all of you for making our city great. yes on b! [ applause ] >> thank you phil, what he didn't complete the story we go

out to school and do reads and do the poet in the pocket once a year. our next leader gives many, many hours of dedicated service to leading the commission, leading the vision for the library, not only the branch library improvement program, but the array of services and programs that we provide. it's my honor and pleasure to work side by sigh with their, our commissioner president julegomez. [ applause ] . >> thank you so much, what i want to do today in addition to thanking my fellow commissioners teresa and michael, and thanking the mayor and our supervisors. [ applause ] what i usually like to do is to remind all of us that this is sacred ground. the people who came before most of us, the native people who came before us believed that this ground was sacred and no one is an owner. we are stewards of this ground.

the dirt that you are going to play in and plant in is the legacy that those people have left us. it's really appropriate, i think that we have gone to all corners of the city. we have gone east and south and west and we conclude here in the north with our final blessing of this land here in north beach, the home of so many wonderful poets and authors, writers, who bring great honor to this land. and there is nothing that i can think of more honorable than a library that will bring together all of the worlds that we know and many worlds that we don't yet know will all be on this land for all of us for years to come. thank you so much for your

support. we're going to continue to need it as we go forward building. thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you, jule. i see another former library commission president and former commissioner charles. thank you for your great service as well. [ applause ] when we talk about partnerships, there is no other group that better defines partnerships for the city and support and the public-private partnership than the friends of the san francisco public library and have provided the funding for all of our furniture, the fixtures and all of the equipment. it truly owns our library in that regard. it's my pleasure to introduce of the executive director of the friends of the san francisco libraries scott. >> [ applause ] . >> thank you. it's a pleasure to be here. as luis said we had this fantastic public-private partnership for 23 branchs and now is your opportunity if you

want to join 4400 other san franciscans who raised $12.7 million for other branchs we invite you to join us back at tent and catherine is waving her arm where's you can join us in the north beach campaign. we have john briscoe, our honorary chair, who will lead that along with our board of directors, camilla, john. steven. carol goodman. we have haven't done this alone. i would like to quickly acknowledge our partnership organizations. friends of joe dimaggio, russian river, the committee for better parks and recreation for north beach, the community youth center, telegraph hill center. sherman elementary. the francisco middle school pto.

states peter and paul school. john parker elementary and garfield elementary and thank you victoria pastry cake donated the cake and make sure you eat some cake and join us for our campaign in north beach. thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you, scott. we're almost there. oh, former commissioner lonnie chen. thank you lonnie for being here [ applause ] we're almost there. one more individual. she has already been mentioned. it's a perfect tribute, a capstone, julie christiansen. >> thank you >> can i get my team up here? i have been fielding all the thanks, but it doesn't really

belong to me. it belongs to all of these people. who else is here from our group? come on up. who am i missing? >> the whole village, come on up. >> so we have a couple of city folks. where is greg scott? gret get up here. greg, get up here. i want to point out jill, karen. jill is the deputy chief librarian and karen, these two women are the fairy godmothers of this project. we would not be here without all the people that you heard from, but we would not be here without them. give thermometer a big round of applause. [ applause ] >> we have also got on city staff our aquatic director greg scott. [ applause ]

>> and let's see, who else did we get up here? huh? mindy. mindy is on my list. i am the last speaker. they are going to try to limit me to the public hearing three minutes and i'm going to try to stick to that, probably not. [ [ laughter ] after i'm finished we're going to turn some dirt. we have a food truck because we deposit want anybody hungry. you guys patronize them if you will. mel sharp and his band are going to be back playing after the speeches. so hang around and party down. i just have a few people that i need to thank. [ laughter ] i will do the short list. of course the mayor. mayor lee has had a lot of celebrating to do this week. we're really grateful here is here. our district 3 supervisor david chiu and his staff. they never pick up the phone or

answer an email without saying, "what do you need and what can i do?" our head librarian, luis herrera. we were the first library on the list and we'll be the last one in the current branch library program to be completed. a lot of hard decisions and he stood with us. phil ginsburg, rec and park director. our dpw director mohammed, the last time i saw o & m mohammed he was pushing a wheelbarrow. our department heads have stood with us. jill, karen, besides them, gary, who was at the time capital planning manager for rec and park.

mindy, lenu chen, the manager for the project. michael from planning, john from the city attorney's office. michelle and mary, michelle is with the library and mary is with the friends of the library and put on this event today. our commissioners, rec and park, planning, library, who have voted unanimously. some of them more than once for this project. our board of supervisors, who stood with us. the architects, marsha and a special thanks to erin who has done so much to help us on though this project. you know? that is the city side of this public-private partnership and i have to be fair in saying that this project has lasted through the term of two supervisors, two head librarians, three mayors, and four rec and park general managers. the heart of this project, the constant thing has been the heart of this neighborhood. has been our volunteers and our

people. [ applause ] >> so i want to introduce june. [ applause ] , liz diaz. amy miles. bill collins. martha mahoney, who also does our halloween. terry. i saved lizzy. this is lizzy hirsch. she has been there. one of the founders of the friends of joe d in 1997. what started with planting a little grass on the children's playground has greatly expanded. few people know that the movie "thelma and louise" is a highly fictionalized account of lizzy and mine's adventures. [ applause ] >> most of it is overstated except for the driving off the cliff part. we have done that more than once.

[ laughter ] the so yay lizzy. [ applause ] where is tan? he won't come up here, but there is tan hiding in the back. [ applause ] of the chinese town community development center. tan is one of the hardest working neighborhood activists and one of the smartest political operatives that i know. i learn something every time i talk to him and we have really used his help on this project. tina of the russian river neighbors wasn't able to be here, but her colleagues were and we thank the russian hill neighbors for standing by us, our sister organizations, all of our schools. nester from the telegraph center. we're honored by the number of people who have stood by us on this project. a special shutout to our families, to the spouses and the children that have had to work around and make due for so long while we

were away doing something else. a special thanks to my husgreg husband greg smith. [ applause ] greg let us cut his birthday trip to hawaii short by a day and fly back on his birthday, so i could be here today. so if you wouldn't mind saying happy birthday greg. happy birthday greg! so this is a threshold, a beginning, a start. we're going to build a new library. there are a couple of other starts today. today is the start of the effort to raise money to furnish and equip that library. the friends of the library have done an incredible job of doing that with 23 other branches. we're the last. we don't want to tiredly limp over that finish line. we want to show them what our neighborhood can do. so you are going to be getting the asks. the ask is to be able to help

with that effort to furnish our library and equip it to make it the best library in the city of san francisco. so stay tuned, we need your help again. one more and that is prop b. how many people are going to vote in this election? can i see a show of hands? how many people will vote for prop b? >> yes. >> how many of you can think of at least two or three or four people in the next couple of days that you can talk to to make sure that they are voting for prop b, because that is it what it's going to take. we are within one or two percentage points ever victory. the people that you talk to could be the people that make the difference in that election. i want to thank the mayor and our supervisors, and phil ginsburg for putting us on that bond. let's get prop b passed, shall

we? [ applause ] so we're gog to turn some dirt and we're going to start a library. thank you all for being here today. you made this happen. [ applause ] >> thank you, julie. well-done, julie. thank you. thank you. mr. mayor, will you have the honors. district supervisors, mohammed, phil, julie, come on down here and grab yourself a shovel and we're going to have a countdown. are we ready? let's have a countdown. on the count of 10, 9, 8, 7, 6,

5, 4, 3, 2, 1! north beach 5, 4, 3, 2, 1! north beach >> so nicely here, and very happy that all of you could come out and join us, you know, on this evening. my namey. the director of the night rover challenge. i'm going to kind of be the moderator for tonight, as we go

through this first-ever challenge america summit. so i've got just a few things that, you know, i wanted to do with everyone, before we get into the program. first of all, i just want to take a minute and have everyone just look around this room. in this room, we have amazing people that are corporate, nonprofit, and government, all focused on challenge driven innovation in some way or another. this is a really powerful,interf people that are gathered here to look at how competitions can drive innovation. that's what tonight is all about, is, you know, the next step in creating a real wave of innovation. my job tonight is just to give you a little bit of background on what we are, what we're tiqp)q)s that we have.roup of so just to get going with that, i want to tell you a little bit

about this thing called the night rover/< challenge. this is a collaboration between the clean tech open, unoodle, and nasa. it's a program from nasa's office of centennial challenges. and it's challengin the best innovators in america to create radical new energy storage technology. you know, way above what we have now. this is something very powerful, to be able to keep rovers going on the moon, in mars, things that could be useful, in your cell electric vehicles, something that just is a radical leap in new technology. but i don't want to go into a lot of detail on that. you'll hear more about nasa's efforts later. and what i'm going to do1r is ge a little more background on challenge-driven innovation. and i'm going to do that just by plaijerrizing some people because it makes it a loteasier for me. i want to look at this quote, prize is a very old -- an old

idea that is surprisingly powerful in our modern society. this is by a study that by mckenzie and company, back in 2010. prize is a very old idea, very powerful in our modern society. surprisingly powerful in our modern society. mckenzie also said this, 32,000, in 2010, there were 32,000no competitions, competitions, prizes, awards. that's a big number. it could be bigger but it's a big number, for one year, 32,000 competitions happened. to continue on in myk mckenzie also said this, while tens of thousands of prizes and awards are give out every year, we've been struck by the lack of conferences or professional associations to share best practices and facilitate collaboration. now there's some kind of relationship between what doing here today, and that.

i don't know exactly what it is, but hopefully by the end of tonight and tomorrow, we can start j we're doing here, can really start toqphp having an organization, or, you know, somethingd exactly what mckenzie is saying is missing. so this just brings me to myó last question. and it's why are we here. here inca this room. that's just one side of it. i'm not talking about why we're here in som galactic cosmic sense of theá@ word. what i'm talking about is a more important part of that question. i am missing a slide in there. so the important part of that question was why are we here in san francisco. and we're here in san francisco

because san francisco is one of the most innovative cities in the galaxy, and it's a very great place to be the home of the challenge america summit, the first-ever challenge america summit. so it's now my job to introduce our first speaker of the night, who is going to officially kick off the first-ever challenge america summit, somebody who has been verylfe instrumental in creating a movement around innovation in san francisco. just a few months ago, announced october as innovation month inla whole lot of work on, you know, creating a@g real ecosystem for entrepreneurs, for governments, for everybody to create new ideas and new innovations. please join me in welcoming mayor ed lee to the floor. >> [applause.] >> thank you.

thank you, josh. welcome, everybody. now that i know where i'm at, i want to welcome all of you, i want to of course thank the night challenge -- night rover challenge, nasa, of course, for being here. i also want to thank s.p.u.r. again for hosting it. you know, when i started working with s.p.u.r. many years ago, i knew they were a spacey people. didn't realize it would ultimately end like this. wanted to thank s.p.u.r. because they really have always been host for so many of our great ideas of how to do better planning in the city. i also want to thank -- i know jennifer is here as well -- i told you when i first met you, i love your title, director of prizes? are you kidding? of course she has the longer title, but i thought that when bevan dufty and i were creating the director of hope in san francisco that we thought we had a pretty good title but now i'm going to change over, director of prizes. i may have to adopt that for

some of our programs. but that's exciting for you to be here as well. certainly for green tech, open, for their contributions here, because it's really a neat blend, with the efforts that we're doing, both in innovation, as well as being greener and trying to continue earning the greenest city of america title that we earned just this past year. we've been pretty lucky. as i announced this innovation month, there has just been scores of ideas that has come forward about what we could do, how we could celebrate, and how we could expose a lot more about what our technology companies are doing here in collaboration with so many others. but i'll begin by saying, first, you know, there are some things happening in our city that are just incredible. you know, i didn't declare myself to be, you know, the tech mayor, even though i've kind of fallen into a lot of that. i actually wanted to be -- and

earned the title being the jobs mayor. the jobs for the city has been my number one goal. and we've been doing pretty well. when i first began last year in 2011, unemployment rate here was 9.6. and just a few months ago, we celebrated the milestone that it went down to 7.4. and that's like the third lowest in the state. well, today, we got some even better news. so how about we flip 9.6, a year ago, to 6.9. today, it's 6.9. >> [applause.] >> and technology is leading the way. we're home to now -- just within our 49 square miles, we're home to 1,635 technology companies, still growing, over 225 clean tech companies, more than 100 biotech companies, and we have owncone of those categories or

growing more every month. imgetting excited because that means a lot more jobs. i think we will soon lead the whole state. and i kind of say that too because marin county has traditionally been lower than ours and so has san mateo. i think marin county has been lower because we have their wine, you will probably have some tonight and san ma taiee because it's our airport that emploaxcju everybody there. so we will take credit for all three counties. i told jerry, i'm never going to complain to jerry brown, what he to happen in the state legislature, because i used the first year and a half to insulate myself from all of that, emotionally as well as programmatically to say i'm not going to let the state hurt our city or the federal government. we've got to innovate our way out of this economic dole drum

and we are doing so with inviting people here. those of you who take this word challenge, and really can really seriously bring that to fore with your best ideas, this is what i'm doing with all these technology companies. i'm not satisfied with just hosting a new company in the city, i want to know what they're doing, who's working there, where they're coming from, what they plan for the five or 10 years and how we can help them grow. as they're growing their jobs i want to know technologically how we can help. that's why i love going to accelerators, to find out what are the next five years that we're incubating so when it comes like what happened last week with dr. yam naka working at gladstone institute at mission bay becomes one of the newest nobel prize winners in medicine working with uc-san francisco and the pharmaceutical companies there,

they're on the verge of discovering wonderful stem cell research that will cure a lot of cancers in our lifetime. you're going to see some cures come out of mission bay. we're doing the right thing, we're creating this wonderful, exciting innovative spirit in the city and we're doing it, not just with the companies locating here, with the people that are here, we're asking employees of the company to step up, through our sf city, our tech chamber of commerce, and volunteer their time to improve things that are not working as well as we'd like in the city. we have on-line ability called improve sf that allows people to come on line, tackle a lot of the issues that the city faces, allow for some c)eative thinking, people who can't spend a lot of time in meetings with us, that can actually offer their ideas on line, and we take those ideas very seriously. so we've been working on things on like how to make muni faster, how to bring fresh foods to low

income poverty areas of the city, and our newest one, just to given you a sense, we wanted everybody to help us develop and design a new library card. talk about civic engagement. 2,000 submissions on line for a new designed library card. that leads me to a challenge that i would like to announce, as part of this night rover challenge, and that is we have been asking ourselves a question, along the lines of energy use in the city, something that has been hard for us to figure out. and that has to do with what would inspire you, as someone who lives in the city, to give your data of your own energy use in the city, like your home energy use? all that data about when you use it, what are your hot times, your cool times. how about if we try to find some way to inspire people to give us that]h data, in some coordinated way. because if we understand that 20

to 22% of our emissions comes from1ar residenl use, you can imagine if we had that data coming from every household use in the city we could break that data down with involvement of creative people like yourselves, and then try o see where there's patterns where we could lessen our carbon footprint and talk about better energy use. that's perfect for us. that's what we're going to ask this challenge to present for our next improve sf challenge for the city. and that's what we'd like to engage people in. and then hopefully, some time after this challenge is announced, and if we can get the best ideas out there, we will be engaged with you to select the best answer. and if there's an idea out there that can answer that question about how to inspire